


Brace for Recoil

by Mithrigil



Category: Dangan Ronpa, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Manipulation, Multi, Psychological Horror, Spoilers, Start Of Darkness, Super High School Level Despair, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-19 04:50:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/879659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peko didn’t fall into despair: she descended, one blind step at a time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Proofreading and encouragement credits to Viki, Flores, and Puel, in all of whom I am proud to have induced despair.
> 
>  **This fic is a walking spoiler** and I tried to tag judiciously, but I want to warn for that again. In addition to revealing the circumstances behind the Twilight Syndrome Murders in SDR2 Chapter 2, this fic has spoilers through the Chapter 6 trial.
> 
> Still here? _Excellent._

The ashes will remain at the Kuzuryuu family compound. The Young Master wants to take them back to Hope’s Peak and display them in the room of their...well, “former owner” isn’t the appropriate thing to call her. The ashes are still Kuzuryuu Nabiki’s. They’re more hers than anything else. Her being dead doesn’t make the ashes not hers.

Peko has stood behind and beside the Young Master all through the funeral, the cremation, the receiving line outside the family shrine. The Young Master is bearing up well. He hasn’t lashed out or run off to sulk. He wouldn’t, in front of the family. Not even for this. Peko would run off for him, if she could, and knock every shoji in the compound down if he wanted her to. But he doesn’t. And Peko has to be ready for him, whatever he decides he wants.

The line of relatives and friends expressing condolences is endless. First, they enter the shrine, and then, minutes later, come out to greet the family. Everyone has a kind word to say about Nabiki, the perfect little sister, and the tragedy of her death. Sweat beads at the Young Master’s hairline and collar and the corners of his eyes. Every minute he stands there, every person he speaks to, the stains and the redness get harder for him to conceal.

And then Nabiki’s friends and classmates start paying their respects, and Pekoyama unsheathes her sword a fraction of a centimeter.

“It’s--it’s so wrong, I’m so sorry,” Nabiki’s friend Tsumiki Mikan says, fidgeting with the bandages on her forearm, “it wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

“No shit,” the Young Master says through his teeth.

Her friend, a redheaded junior whose name and talent Peko can’t remember, grimaces. “Not at a place like Hope’s Peak. And not so gruesomely. Not like that! And not to someone like her. It’s all just wrong.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“No, I know, I just--I’m sorry.”

“That’s rich,” a third junior says, shorter and pricklier than the others, wearing formal kimono. She elbows Tsumiki in the behind, not gently at all. “Come on, pig bitch, you’re holding up the line.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Whatever, let’s _go_. Sorry, pintsize.”

The Young Master wipes his forehead with one tight fist. “What did you just call me?”

Peko puts a hand on the Young Master’s shoulder, and says, level, “Not here. Please, let me.”

“Ooh, let you what?” another student says, looking a long way down, and both Peko and the Young Master stay exactly where they are.

She’s not a student Peko knows, so she must be one of the entering freshmen at Hope’s Peak, but there’s something immediately familiar about her that Peko can’t put her finger on. It might be her outfit, which is on trend and skimpy and thoroughly inappropriate for a funeral even if it’s only black and white. It might be her hairstyle, voluminous blond and pink pigtails held back with panda clips that Peko can’t help but think are adorable. It might be her complexion, as glossy and smooth as a magazine cover, or her expression, brighter-eyed than everyone at the funeral so far.

Pekoyama Peko knows a threat when she sees one, and keeps her hand on her sword.

“Nothing,” the Young Master says. His shoulder relaxes, but Peko doesn’t let go. He doesn’t sound any less angry, no matter his polite words. “Thank you for coming.”

“Well of course I came! I have to see what happens to hope when it gets so superlatively _dashed_ , don’t I?” The freshman winks, purses her lips over one curled finger with a long red rhinestoned nail. “What do you _do_ with a death like hers, I wonder? Well, nothing if you’re dead. But you’re not dead, are you, Fuyuhiko-senpai?”

This girl has crossed about six lines in five sentences. But the Young Master speaks up before Peko can. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Something about the freshman _shifts_. Peko has faced thousands of kendoka, knows that shift for the feint it is, but a civilian shouldn’t be so seamless at it. “Nothing,” the freshman says. Her voice is lower, huskier than it was a second ago. “But there’s something you want to talk about, isn’t there, senpai. Something you’re _salivating_ to talk about.”

“Excuse me,” Peko says as politely as she can, but if this freshman girl knows anything about combat she’ll look at Peko’s hip instead of her eyes. “There are other people who wish to speak to the Young Master.”

“Peko, you don’t have to--”

The freshman claps her hands and swivels her hips from side-to-side, like the middle-school girls in television dramas. “Oh, Peko-senpai! I didn’t see you there at all! You’re on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot, that’s so _sweet!_ Or more like a villain’s vulture, huh? A gangster’s moll? Nah, you don’t have the legs to be a moll.”

“You insult Peko one more time and I’ll--”

“Ooh, what _will_ you do, Fuyuhiko-senpai? What kind of filthy kinky torture do you yakuza get up to? Handcuffs? Waterboarding? Acupuncture with live pufferfish? I’ve only got twenty-eight knuckles and every single one of them is insured for sixty thousand yen. You might have to start on my toes.”

“You are out of line!” Peko cuts in front of the Young Master, glares up into the freshman’s face. “Young Master, give the order and I will immediately remove her.”

The freshman looks down her nose, but with an expression of genuine surprise, at least at first. “Does it really take an order, Peko-senpai? Ooh, how salacious. That’s fucking depraved, you know that? Fucking sickening. Fucking _weak_.”

Peko raises her sword to strike--

“And that goes double for you, Fuyuhiko-senpai,” she says, back to her first face, her first stance. “Doesn’t it?”

“No one calls me weak,” the Young Master snarls. “ _No one._ ”

All innocence, the freshman says, “But I just did, didn’t I?”

Peko brings her sword down, and sparks fly when it fails to meet its target. The freshman’s face flashes in front of her, once, completely unsmiling, but it’s not the girl with the make-up and pigtails, it’s a different one, dark-haired, with a bowie knife. Peko and the girl spring apart, and the rest of the Kuzuryuu family guards swarm in with guns and knives and sunglasses, tattoos peeking out of the collars of their funeral suits.

The girl with the knife glares at Peko. Her eyes are almost perfectly empty, steady and grey and cool, and for a moment Peko envies her. They put up their weapons simultaneously.

The freshman girl laughs and looks at the gangsters surrounding her like they’re adoring fans. “You’re all a bunch of perverts,” she says, like it’s exciting, like she’s about to lick her chops. But she doesn’t, and her friend--sister, maybe, Peko thinks, they look enough alike--looks her in the eye with the same kind of silent warning Peko wishes the Young Master would heed. Whether the freshman girl heeds it or not, Peko can’t be sure; but her stance shifts again, along with her voice and her eyes. “Looks like everyone here can protect you but you, senpai. That’s gotta suck. Whatever, _adios_ ,” she tacks on, and sashays away between two armed guards, heels clacking, her bodyguard in her wake.

“Young Master,” Peko starts to say, but doesn’t get to _it isn’t true_.

“Shut up, Peko, I don’t need--“ He cuts himself off, turns on his heel and storms off toward the shrine. “Just shut up.”

***

**Enoshima Junko** , the school roster says. **Super High School Level Gyaru. 78th class,** which would in fact make her a freshman, **Homeroom 1-B**. The Internet has a great deal more to say. Enoshima is one of five students in her year with Wikipedia pages in both Japanese and English: the other four are the Togami heir, the doujinka, the author, and Oogami Sakura, whose career Peko has been following with interest and respect ever since they met at a national competition three years ago. Whereas nearly all of the freshmen have blogs and dedicated Nico channels and fansites and even official fan clubs, Enoshima has all that plus dedicated threads on 2ch and magazine interviews in four languages and _What Would Junko Do_ memes all over Google.

In the next room, the Young Master is asleep. Peko insisted on standing vigil, but he threw her out. It isn’t the first time. Aside from after the assassination attempt two years ago, he hasn’t let her share his room since they were ten. Peko listens through the shoji until her laptop screen dims for lack of attention.

**Enoshima Junko,** the Internet says. A captivating chameleon on the street and on the runway, never the same walk twice. Her photographs show hundreds of different expressions, different people behind her eyes, a bottomless soul full of fashionable possibilities. No history or indication of combat experience whatsoever, which is probably why she has that bodyguard. But she has legions of fans, and a name more famous than Peko’s and more infamous than the Young Master’s, and Peko has no doubt that Enoshima earned her right to be at Hope’s Peak.

But no one has the right to talk to the Young Master that way. _No one._

A stutter and a cough break through the shoji, and Peko listens again, puts the laptop down. With a wall between them, it’s hard to tell if he’s crying or just having trouble sleeping. Neither is acceptable, but he already threw Peko out once tonight, and if she were to ask again he might never forgive her. And Peko would endure that, as long as he let her stay, but--

It doesn’t bear thinking about. There’s more research to do. She is the Young Master’s sword and shield, and he will need her once they go back to school, to defend him from the whispers and cut down anyone who speaks up.

And if Enoshima Junko comes anywhere near him, Peko will enact the Young Master’s will, however brutal it is.

***

“But I assure you,” Headmaster Kirigiri says, “we will do everything we can to cooperate with the police and get to the bottom of this. I hate to admit it, but it’s not the first time someone has targeted a Hope’s Peak student. You certainly know that. It’s not even the first--or the second--time during my tenure as Headmaster, and I’m not proud, but we did solve that case, and I promise you we’ll solve Nabiki’s.”

“Sure,” the Young Master says. Peko says nothing.

“But in order for the investigation to go smoothly, I have to insist that you leave it to the professionals,” Headmaster Kirigiri goes on, as if the Young Master never said anything at all, let alone something sardonic. “You might not know this,” he scratches the back of his neck like a teenager, “but I come from a long line of professional detectives, and we have a Super High School Level Detective in the freshman class as well. Kuzuryuu-kun, I know that your family has a lot of pride, and doesn’t like involving the law in your affairs. But it’s not just your affair, it’s the school’s. So please, for the sake of Hope’s Peak, let the law handle it.”

The Young Master scoffs through his teeth, grips the arms of his chair. “What do you want me to say? You’re not going to believe me if I say yes, and you’re not gonna stop me if I say no.”

Headmaster Kirigiri laughs. “Probably not. But if I don’t have your respect--”

“ _Respect?_ Someone murdered my sister in your school and you want me to respect you?”

“No. I want you to respect my talent.” Headmaster Kirigiri puts his hands on the desk, glances over his shoulder at the plaques and diplomas on the wall behind him, at the framed photograph on his filing cabinet. “Everyone at this school-- _our_ school--everyone who has ever walked these halls is an exemplary person. You, and me, and your classmates, and your sister.”

“And her murderer.”

“Maybe. We don’t know. The police think it’s a serial pervert, not necessarily a student. But you can trust the people who have that talent to find out.”

“You want to talk about talent? Fine. Talk about mine. I’m a Super High School Level Yakuza. That’s why you accepted me, right? You wanted me because I’m the best at doing what a gangster does. So I’ll do what a gangster does. I won’t interfere with your investigation if you don’t interfere with mine.”

He still hasn’t gotten up from his chair, but Peko never sat down. She rests her hand on the back, near his shoulder, and when Headmaster Kirigiri looks to her, all Peko shows him is whose side she is on, whose side she is always on.

Headmaster Kirigiri sighs, but smiles, and shakes his head against the swivel of his chair. “All right. I shouldn’t have expected anything different. But if you do need anything--and I don’t mean help with the investigation, I mean just to talk--you know I’m here.”

The Young Master just gets up and leaves without saying anything more. Peko follows, as she should--

“Pekoyama-kun.”

She turns back, just enough to keep an eye on both of them. “Headmaster?”

“Please,” he says, “just help him.”

Peko can’t keep her cheeks from heating. “That’s all I could ever want.”

He smiles, brighter than she could ever let herself. “You’re dismissed.”

***

Classes are done for the day, but the halls are still crowded, and the students give the Young Master a wider berth than ever. Every senior that he passes can’t look him in the eye, and only a few manage to look at Peko, mouthing apologies. It’s hard to tell if they’re sorry for what happened, or just for standing in his way, and it’s not Peko’s place to ask.

It isn’t even her place to ask where the Young Master is going. But once he gets to the stairwell and heads down, he’s going to the dorms.

“Young Master--”

“Just let me be alone, Peko.” He swats back at her, swings around the curve of the stairwell and almost trips. “If I’m gonna do this I’ve got to do it alone.”

“I understand,” she says, truthfully. “Should I contact the compound and have them extort the police?”

He turns on his heel and barks up at her, “What part of _alone_ don’t you understand?”

“You told Headmaster Kirigiri that you would be doing things our way. I only thought--”

“Well you thought wrong!”

“Forgive me, Young Master. I didn’t think that doing it alone would mean without me. I’m only your tool, so--”

“Shut up, Peko! Just shut up! I don’t need any tools, and I don’t need anybody, and--”

He’s going to cry. She’d stop the tears with anything she has, but all she can think of are her fingers, and she reaches out and down toward his cheeks--

\--and he backs up two steps too many and goes tumbling down the stairs.

She can catch him. She _does_ catch him, though it’s close, and she trips too, tears her tights and bangs her left knee on three hard edges, but if that’s the price for protecting his head she’ll gladly pay it. He holds on to her arms, looks up from her lap.

He’s never said her name like this before.

She doesn’t know whether calling him Young Master now would be appropriate.

Enoshima laughs. A split-second later, she’s not the only one: everyone who saw the commotion is clustered at both levels of the stairwell, staring, whispering, giggling. And the whispers say _pathetic_ and _cute_ , and to the Young Master, both words mean _weak_.

“Just leave me alone!” he shouts, scrambles to his feet and bolts before Peko can say anything else. He bumps into Enoshima, but it doesn’t make the laughter stop.

Apart from Peko, there’s only one person silent in the hallway: the same girl who protected Enoshima at the funeral. Her eyes had been empty then, but now, when she looks at Peko, there’s something like pity in them, and maybe a strained respect.

Peko nods politely at her, ignores everyone else, and heads back up the stairs. 

***

Leaving the Young Master alone doesn’t mean leaving the investigation alone. 

The music room--the crime scene--is almost as crowded as the halls. The police have long since come and gone, and so has the body, but chalk outlines and police line tape create a frame within a frame with an entirely-too-clear picture. A group of freshmen is clustered around the site, and one--a short boy with unruly hair--is staring in reverent awe at the only person on the wrong side of the tape. She speaks with quiet authority, and the boy apparently takes notes on a tablet.

“The victim is Kuzuryuu Nabiki, sixteen years old,” she says, leaning down toward the chalk outlines while the boy thumbs the keypad. “Junior, Class 2-B. Talent, Super High School Level Little Sister.”

A redheaded boy with an attempt at facial hair wrinkles his nose. “Seriously? _That’s_ her talent?”

“You’d be surprised how much skill goes into being a little sister,” the boy taking notes says with an almost sheepish smile. “My little sister isn’t Super High School Level anything and she’s still an expert at getting my parents to do anything for her and, um, a couple of my friends tried to ask her out.”

“It’s even more than that,” the girl conducting the investigation says. “ _Little Sister_ and _Big Sister_ are terms of respect among yakuza, for women who participate in their lifestyle and hold some degree of power. In addition to being a Super High School Level Little Sister in the traditional sense, the victim is the second child of the head of the Kuzuryuu family of gangsters. Her brother, the family heir, is a senior in Class 3-A.”

Peko remains silent in the doorway.

The boy with the unruly hair keeps taking notes, and the girl goes on: “According to the police records, the cause of death was strangulation into unconsciousness, followed by a blow to the head with a blunt object. The body was discovered at 6 AM last Thursday by a janitor and identified by several classmates. It was suggested by the same classmates that a pervert might have been responsible. According to the autopsy she had been dead for over twelve hours before the body was found.”

Triumphantly, the boy finishes thumbing the tablet. “So who else could have gotten in here first?”

_Not at a place like Hope’s Peak!_ that redheaded junior girl said at the funeral, _and not so gruesomely._

It might be the lighting, but the investigator may have just smiled a little. “Good question.” 

“Why’s it a good question?” the one with the goatee asks.

“’Cause of foul play.” A tall freshman tosses back his long coat and massive pompadour: between that and the emblem on that coat, Peko thinks he must be Oowada Mondo, the recently ascended leader of the Crazy Diamonds gang. They’ve done some useful work for the Kuzuryuu family in the past, but not since the previous leader died. Peko resolves to keep an eye on this one.

The investigator takes another file out of her jacket pocket, but instead of looking at it, hands it to the boy with the tablet. “Oowada-kun is right. With that large a window between the death and the discovery, anyone could have tampered with the crime scene. If the victim was killed or even found dead by her rivals, or by someone with a grudge against the Kuzuryuu family, who can say what really happened? Between the police reports being inconclusive about the murder weapon, the culprit’s uncertain method of escape, the convenient anonymous pervert, and the disparity between the time of death and time of discovery, I suspect foul play.” She clenches her glove and grits her teeth. “If only the Headmaster had let me look at the crime scene earlier.”

Peko remembers: _a Super High School Level Detective in the freshman class._ So Headmaster Kirigiri knows, and he’s standing in her way too. So much for trusting in talent.

“You’ll figure it out even if there’s some evidence missing,” the boy with the tablet says. “If someone messed with the crime scene, they must have left tracks.”

“They have. But until we know what happened here overnight, we’ll have nothing to follow.” She looks up, straight at the door. “Isn’t that right, Pekoyama-senpai?”

All of the freshmen in the cluster look at her in turn: the only one who doesn’t flinch is the boy with the tablet. Peko comes into the music room, leaves the door open behind her, and the freshmen clear a good meter out of her way, except the investigator. (The one with the goatee mutters something about her being even scarier than the Ogre. Peko considers it a compliment.) “It’s right,” she says. “But the school won’t reveal that information.”

The investigator nods. “If that’s what you came here to learn, I can’t help you. I intend to question Kuzuryuu-senpai later.”

Peko shakes her head. “The Young Master has no intention of helping you. He wishes to apprehend the murderer himself.”

“She’s the detective here, not him,” the one with the goatee says, pointing.

“I’m aware of that,” Peko says. “Nevertheless, I am merely expressing my master’s intentions. If he wants to find out as much as he can on his own, then I will be his eyes and ears.” She turns back to the investigator. “Since my master intends to gather information on his own, but not to share it, and since for obvious reasons we can’t collaborate with the police, I ask that you share any of your findings with me if they would aid him in his investigation, or if you think his life might be in danger.”

“Done,” the investigator says without a second thought.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” the one with the goatee says.

Oowada laughs. “Don’t tell me you’re on the take.”

“It’s not like that,” the boy with the tablet says. “Solving the crime is more important than taking the credit.”

The investigator nods, then turns to Peko again. “I’d like to ask the same of you.”

“You would have to ask the Young Master,” Peko says, “but he promised Headmaster Kirigiri that he wouldn’t interfere with the law.”

“Hey, she asked you, not him,” the one with the goatee says.

“It’s not my place to make promises.”

“So what, you can just stroll on in and demand our help without offering your own?”

Oowada glares at him. “You don’t know who she is, do you.”

“Yeah, I know who she is, and I know we shouldn’t trust her! For all we know she’s the one who did it!”

That statement requires the same firm correction Peko _always_ gives it: “I only kill for Kuzuryuu Fuyuhiko. To insinuate that I would dare raise my sword against the Young Master’s sister is insulting. _Take it back at once._ ”

He chokes on his first few attempts to apologize. Good. But after a moment of stammering he gets it out, bow and all, “I’m sorry, there’s no excuse, I didn’t mean it like that. Shit. Uh. Sorry.” And then he retreats so that he’s mostly behind Oowada, putting a dent in the caution tape around the crime scene.

Peko turns back to the investigator and the boy with the tablet. “If you find anything, you know where to find me.”

The boy with the tablet nods. “Thanks. And, um, same to you, if you change your mind. I’m Naegi Makoto. Nice to meet you! And this is--”

The investigator nods to cut him off, and bows to introduce herself. “Kirigiri Kyouko. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Thank you,” Peko says, and lets that surname sink in. “So, about the classmates who identified the body...”

***

The Young Master’s door is locked.

He answers when she knocks, though, and that is everything she needs.

****


	2. Chapter 2

The junior girls know that Peko is watching them. That’s fine. What they do about it is much more important, of course. And even more importantly, Peko knows how guilty each one looks.

Tsumiki Mikan, Super High School Level Nurse, is suspect. She reminds Peko of a poor greyhound puppy she once saw at the Kuzuryuu-backed racetrack in Nagasaki, too abused to enter the races but too crazed to put up for adoption, and a runt besides. Peko wanted to take it home, and the Young Master did too and let her try, but it bit her when she backed it into a corner and she still has the scars on her palm. Tsumiki looks like she’s waiting for her corner and her excuse.

Saionji Hiyoko, Super High School Level Classical Dancer, is even more suspect, though Peko concedes that she may merely be vindictive because Saionji is the one who called the Young Master _pintsize_ at Nabiki’s funeral. There is nothing about Hiyoko that arouses immediate suspicion, and she’s small enough that it would have been difficult for her to overwhelm Nabiki in a physical contest, but she is still an athlete and that needs to be taken into account. And her insistence on wearing full kimono on campus half of the time may also absolve her, because evidence of a struggle would be difficult to conceal--which may be evidence in itself.

Peko wonders if this is what the law goes through, or if she’s only paranoid.

Satou Kichiko, Super High School Level Confectioner, is suspect. Sour and defensive despite her name and talent, she is the only one of the group who can’t look Peko in the eyes, and spends most of her time at lunch scowling at her tray. (Then again, there’s nothing but a diet cola and a half-eaten raw radish on that tray, and Satou is awfully thin for the inventor of ChocoPina Mochi, so this may be normal behavior for her.) Still, she’s as worth watching as any of the others.

Mioda Ibuki, Super High School Level Light Music Club Member is...never mind.

But the one of them that Peko needs to speak to the most, suspect or not, is the one whose name and talent she can’t quite place, the redhead from the funeral: the one who seemed to know how Nabiki’s body looked before she died. Nothing about this girl displays her talent: she doesn’t have an athlete’s build or an artist’s personal flair or any immediately visible academic hallmarks. In fact, aside from her freckles she’s not remarkable at all. 

“Peko?”

“Yes, Young Master?”

“What are you staring at them for?”

The Young Master doesn’t want Peko’s help. He doesn’t want her to do anything for him. He doesn’t even want her to gather information for him.

But she can still show him where to look, can’t she?

“I remember them from the funeral, that’s all,” she says, and returns to her lunch. “Were they all Nabiki-sama’s friends?”

The Young Master wrinkles his nose and turns away. “I don’t know. All she ever said was that Hiyoko had it coming and Koizumi didn’t even belong here.”

Koizumi must be the redhead. “Is Koizumi the junior class’ Good Luck?”

“No, I think that’s a guy. I think Koizumi’s a photographer.” He drops his chopsticks onto the tray, tosses them forward like dice. “What’s it matter to you?”

She can’t let him think she’s doing this for him. He has to find out on his own. She repeats it in her mind like a mantra, like the order of motions before practicing a cut. “She may have some photographs of Nabiki.”

“--She what?” The Young Master’s eyes flare wide, and if he had gears Peko could see them turning. She doesn’t permit herself to look knowing or satisfied at all. _He has to find out on his own. He has to find out on his own._ “Peko, wait here,” he says, and gets up, leaving his tray behind.

She understands, and says so, and keeps an eye on him from here. It should be fine. And if he fails, she can pick up where he left off or steer him like this again--

“Looks like this seat’s not taken anymore,” Enoshima says, and plunks herself down right across from Peko. “Ooh, still warm. I guess even upperclassmen fart.”

Peko does not choke on her rice. She _does not._

She also doesn’t have time to stop Enoshima from leaning over and going on, all smiles now, “Hear you’ve been poking around a Super High School Level Detective’s business end.”

“I spoke to Kirigiri-kun,” Peko says. There’s no point in denying it. “What should it matter to you?”

“Hey, lots of things matter to me! I’ve got a civic duty to share my talents with the world, don’t I? Gotta know what’s trendy! If a whole bunch of improbably-greyish-blond girls with sticks up their asses try to rule the school, I might have to change my hair or something. Get it?”

No, Peko doesn’t. But that doesn’t matter.

“Still,” Enoshima says, leaning onto one hand and sighing, “it’s almost romantic how you’re leading him by the nose. Subversive, even. The sort of thing you’d find in a neo-mannerist pseudo-harlequin drugstore romance drama targeted at bored housewives and office ladies who want to make sweet fade-to-black love with their supervisors on a desk of roses.”

Over at the table with the junior girls, the Young Master is arguing with Saionji, a grimace plain across his face. They’re uneasy with him, that’s clear as day: Tsumiki is cringing, Mioda and Koizumi are wincing, Satou is glaring at her radish--and over here Enoshima is _still talking._

“You know, Peko-senpai, I get you. I totally get you. I _grok_ you. You’ve just got one thing you want, and you give it your all. Your everything. Mind. Soul. Supple yet feminine body.”

“What do you want, Enoshima-kun?”

She covers her mouth in mock offense or laughter, it’s hard to say. “Peko-senpai! I am shocked, utterly and thoroughly shocked! Surely a girl can seek advice of a beautiful and talented upperclassman in pursuing her social goals! Surely one must ask permission of the person closest to the object of her fleeting teenage affection! Surely your endorsement is required to say even the most trifling thing to Fuyuhiko-senpai! I am merely respecting your wishes.”

Oh. It’s not the first time someone has expressed that sort of interest in the Young Master. It’s also not the worst way someone’s gone about expressing that interest. (Not that either attempt was successful in the end: one Valentine’s Day in middle school a girl gave him chocolates but turned his down a month later, and last year on the school trip to Easter Island a Super High School Level Mecha Pilot confessed her love but made the mistake of calling him cute and had to transfer out of Hope’s Peak, and neither of these people sought Peko’s approval first.) But in Enoshima’s case, if she wants Peko’s approval, she doesn’t have it at all--

\--but that shouldn’t matter, should it? It matters what the Young Master wants, not what Peko wants.

“I appreciate that,” Peko says, carefully, “but the Young Master doesn’t require my approval if you want to speak to him.”

Enoshima laughs in Peko’s face. “Huh. So that’s the kind of relationship you have. Kinky.”

Peko can’t keep her cheeks from heating up. It shouldn’t show. It better not show. “That’s none of your business, Enoshima-kun. Talk to the Young Master if he lets you.”

“Why shouldn’t he let me? He’s a man, ain’t he?”

“He doesn’t appreciate you calling him weak in front of his entire family.”

“His entire family and half the school. Don’t forget, half of the school.”

“It would have been your death sentence if you hadn’t called in your friend to protect you. Do not forget that.”

“Well, worthless little Muku-chan can’t protect me all the time, can she? If Fuyuhiko-senpai wants you to get rid of poor sweet innocent defenseless me, why hasn’t he sent you to slit my pale unblemished throat?”

The junior girls have just driven him off. Peko should be there with him. Peko should be doing this for him. Peko should be his shield.

“Clearly, he cares about me,” Enoshima says. “So, can I speak to him?”

Peko shoves back her chair and leaves the tray for the janitorial staff. “Excuse me.”

***

He makes it to his room before she can catch up. It slides shut in her face and nearly clips her bangs on the way, but that isn’t his fault, that’s only wiring and timing and she shouldn’t mind. All it means is that she has to knock.

“Shit, Peko. I just locked it.”

“Should I leave?”

“No. Just--gimme a second.” She waits, and listens: his breath might be so hoarse from running off, so loud because he thinks he’s alone. When the door opens, his eyes are dry, only a little bloodshot at the corners. “It’s fine. Come in.”

She does, and he shuts the door behind her, then shunts off to his desk chair and sits, bowed forward, elbows on his knees. “So what is it?” he asks, more to the floor than to her.

_I want to help,_ she can’t say. “I want to be of use to you.” That’s better, that’s closer. That still puts everything in his hands.

Well, his hands are fists now, and he slams them down onto his thighs. “I don’t need that! I have to do this on my own.”

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t use what you have, and you have me.”

“That’s not--” he starts, then cuts himself off with a growl and pounds his fist into the arm of the chair. He’s looked at her with that kind of anger before, and she’s endured it: he can feel whatever he wants for her, even if it hurts. “You’re not something I _have_ , Peko.”

“Are you casting me aside?”

“Peko, stop it.”

She shuts her eyes and says, “I understand,” even if it’s a lie.

“No you don’t! You don’t know what it feels like. You don’t know what it’s like when they take something from you and you can’t take it back. And can’t do anything. And can’t even punish the people who took it from you because you don’t know who they are. You don’t understand.”

He needs to say it, and it’s true. “You’re right, Young Master. I don’t. But I do know what it’s like to see you hurt and have you tell me _I_ can’t do anything.”

Even with her eyes closed, she feels him glaring. But when she opens them, it’s not as hard a glare as it was: heavy, and steady except for his grit teeth, but not like he’s trying to slice her in half with his eyes. More like an opponent in a spar, gauging her strength.

A thrill runs down her spine and gathers in her core.

“Please,” she says, “I’ll do anything. Just let it be _something_. Let me be something that’s helpful to you.”

“You’re not a thing, Peko!” He springs out of the chair, charges her. “Shut up! I don’t need _things!_ I need--”

He stops, close enough to her that she can feel his breath on her chin, close enough that she sees him both through and under her glasses, close enough to touch, hold, give something to, be something for--

(And Enoshima’s lewd remarks blaze in the base of Peko’s skull.)

“--I need to do be strong enough on my own!” he yells, and the moment, the closeness, is gone. “I can’t let this make me weak! I can’t be weak! So you can’t help me. No one can. If I don’t do it myself it’s the same as not doing it at all!”

A part of Peko wants to cry out that it isn’t true, that none of that is true, that the Young Master is strong and worthy and that it doesn’t matter how strong you are when all you have is a hammer and nothing looks like a nail. But that part of her has to contend with the Young Master’s voice in her head, telling her what he does and doesn’t need, and that part is more important. It’s that simple.

Isn’t it?

He’s at the door. His hand hovers over the lock to let her out, but he doesn’t press it. The sweat on his palm shines, shifts. He shouldn’t be trembling, she should do something to take that away, should do something at all.

He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want her.

But he doesn’t force her out the door. “Those junior girls,” he says, his voice as choked and shaky as his hand. “They said they don’t know anything. They’re lying. That brat Saionji cut the others off when they tried to say anything about pictures. I can do this, Peko. I can push them and find out who killed Nabiki. And I’ll do it alone. Nabiki deserves that. She wouldn’t want me to be weak.” He shuts his eyes, turns away to smile faintly. “Remember last year when that asshole brain surgeon messed with her and made a fool of her at the freshman quiz show?”

“I do.”

“She wouldn’t let me give him what he had coming, remember? She had to stop me from breaking any more of his fingers.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Did she ever tell you what she said to me after that?”

Peko shakes her head. “I thought she’d only done it to keep you from getting expelled.”

“No. She told me that if this was gonna be about her brain, then she’d have to use her brain to show him what’s what, not my hands.”

Ah. “I see. I thought the incident in the labs was only karma.”

“No, that was Nabiki. She rigged that. She showed him what she could do and...” He lets his hand down from the doorknob. “He’ll never mess with her again. I guess no one will, now.”

Peko remembers a different loss, a different night, longer ago than that. She remembers their futons, side-by-side with shared blankets, while he curled against her shoulder in his sleep and held on tight. It was the first time someone tried to take a hit out on the Young Master. He was eight. A dozen guards stood vigil outside but he wanted _her, here_ , he said as much. 

She remembers her orders the next morning, direct from the Kumichou. _You’ve been his shield, now be his sword._

“But she can’t pay them back for this,” the Young Master says. “She can’t get revenge. She can’t show them how much it hurts. So it’s up to me. An eye for an eye. They sowed it, so they’ll reap it. And I’ve got to do it the way she’dve done it. She never called in help. She never sent someone else in to do the dirty work. I’ve got to be as strong as her. Stronger than her.”

“But Young Master, if her killer comes after you--”

“That doesn’t matter! If I can’t take it without other people covering for me, what’s the point?”

“Young Master, no! The people who protect you do it because they want you to live and be safe!”

“Well maybe I shouldn’t! What’s the point of being alive if I’m just relying on other people?”

Peko’s heart is dead weight in her chest.

“And--” His hand comes up to the knob again, and this time it’s a fist. “Just go, Peko. Just get out.”

“Young Master, I won’t leave you alone like this.” The words are out before she can stop them, and she isn’t sure her heart’s started working again because her breath’s failed her too. “--Forgive me.”

“It’s fine. Just go. I--I have to go to class. We’re late. I shouldn’t cut class.”

_You should go to Headmaster Kirigiri,_ she can’t say. _You should call the Kumichou. You should have taken another week off from school. You should let me stay here and help you and be something you need. You should tell me what I need to do._

But he has. He’s told her to go.

“I’ll see you there,” she says, and if the words come out too heavy, it’s her fault, not his. “Excuse me.”

He opens the door, and shuts it behind her.

***

Ever since Sawada Mitsuo, the Super High School Level Kyuudoka, and Oniniwa Hazuki, the Super High School Level Markswoman, joined the student council (and, according to rumors, started dating), it’s been much easier for everyone else to use the Hope’s Peak dojo without getting shot. Peko had nearly grown accustomed to the thrill of arrows and bullets whizzing by and targets exploding while she went through forms: it was, in its way, almost like being at the Kuzuryuu compound, only the conversation was less frequent and more charged, and nobody at the compound ever stopped firing at each other only to start necking against the lockers. (At least, they don’t do that around Peko.) But today, Peko welcomes the deserted space and the quiet that goes with it, and slaughters four training dummies in relative peace.

There is nothing amiss with her form. Her grip is correct, her pace is fine, her arms don’t slacken no matter how many cuts she puts them through. Along the wall, Hi-def sakura petals fall on the wall screen, completely unperturbed by the violence in her strikes. The training dummies admonish her with their steady blank stares even after she slices the seams that represent their eyes, and lopping off their heads only means they stare up from the floor. It should be enough. She should be enough.

It isn’t, and she isn’t, and if she destroys any more school property without a researcher present, she may have to pay for it.

She sheathes her sword, kneels to pick up the nearest fallen head, and can’t remember which body it belongs to, and stares into its vacant bursts of fluff and chicken wire. 

“The second from the left,” Oogami Sakura says from the sidelines. “Forgive my intrusion.”

Peko nearly drops the head. But her composure hasn’t slipped enough that she can’t say “Thank you,” and she replaces the head on the wiry stump of the dummy’s neck.

Behind her, Oogami comes away from the wall and stands by the lockers, arms crossed. “I have likewise been reprimanded for being overzealous with the training equipment.” 

“Today?”

“No, several weeks ago.”

Peko nods. “If you intended to use these, forgive me.”

Oogami uncrosses her arms and shakes her head, no. “Perhaps it would be better if we were to spar.”

“If you’re offering, I accept.” It’s refreshingly simple to say, and simpler to think: Peko remembers when she and the Young Master first came to Hope’s Peak, and the strongest student in the senior class was a Super High School Level Shinobi, how much she wanted to measure herself against him. It may be presumptuous, but Peko would understand if Oogami felt the same and looked forward to the opportunity.

“I do offer,” Oogami says, and circles the dojo floor to take her corner and flex her fingers.

Peko sets her sword aside and trades it out for her shinai. One look at the soaring dragon on her fukuro brings all of her apprehensions about the Young Master back in full force, but Peko locks those thoughts away, bows, and concentrates on her opponent.

With no one to call the start of the match, the fight cannot begin with a strike. For minutes on end, Peko and Oogami circle and glare into each other’s eyes, searching for weakness where they may well be none. Peko has fought hundreds of unarmed opponents, some even larger and more renowned than Oogami, and it’s clear she’s at their level just from her inscrutable eyes.

But there, there’s a weakness that isn’t a feint: a thick lock of Oogami’s hair clouds her face from the side, in a gust of wind from the air conditioner, and it’s a precious chance to strike.

Peko lunges in, just barely ahead of her shinai, and brings it down, and Oogami blocks it with one massive fist. Cracks ripple down the shinai but it doesn’t snap, and Peko still has time to reverse the strike and whip it into the other side of Oogami’s face. She’s just as quick to block that blow as the first, but her parry is weaker, and Peko knows that means a swing is coming from above and just barely dodges it in time.

Oogami’s punch goes through the dojo floor, into the plaster beneath the wood.

Not that Peko hasn’t seen that before--or done that before--but she didn’t think this was the kind of fight for that.

They spring apart, to opposite sides of the dojo, Oogami braced on one knee and one fist, and Peko’s shinai flung back in one hand. Peko darts her eyes to the crater in the floor, and doesn’t think she’ll have to ask aloud.

“There is no need to hold back,” Oogami says. “I am no mere underclassman.”

Peko’s sword is propped against one of the headless dummies, across the room. Oogami catches her eyeing it, and expands her stance. Well, if Oogami doesn’t want Peko to hold back, she won’t, and she’ll arm herself lethally--but Oogami is in the way. Peko brings her shinai forward, folds both hands around the hilt in a forward guard, and already knows what she must do. _Get the sword._

Her charge isn’t wild, but it’s swift and unrestrained: she lays into Oogami from above, then from the left, whirling into a backhand that takes her under Oogami’s feinting arm. That feint leads into a haymaker that narrowly misses Peko’s head, but Peko keeps her momentum going and skids past the crater in the floor, another few yards toward her goal--

\--Oogami turns that haymaker into a spinning low kick, right into the backs of Peko’s knees.

Peko barely catches herself on her hand instead of her back and springs out of the way. Her wrist nearly buckles from the strain but it’s still enough to keep her moving, and as long as she isn’t upside-down when Oogami attacks next she’ll be fine.

A fist the like the jaws of a python wraps around Peko’s right ankle. So much for _fine._

Oogami throws her clear across the room and into the sakura screen, and there’s no time to block or brace. The screen cracks and blacks out completely, and searing pain runs down her shoulder, then doubles and _crunches_ when shards of plexiglass bite into her clothes. Only years of training keep Peko holding onto the shinai, and it’s not in much better shape than she is.

Then again, neither is Oogami: her hairline is dripping red, out of the welt from Peko’s first salvo. The blood fills the crags of Oogami’s face on both sides of her nose, like tears, but her expression is too hardened to cry.

Peko stands, carefully, swatting the shards of the screen off her clothes. She can still fight--her right arm isn’t compromised, and the left isn’t broken or dislocated, just bruised, she thinks--and it’s clear that Oogami can as well. But with no one to call the match--

“You took first blood,” Oogami says.

Peko shakes her head. “You drove me out of the ring.”

“It’s Oogami-san’s victory,” someone else says from the doorway. “Look at your weapon, Pekoyama-senpai.”

Never mind the shinai, that might be Enoshima in the doorway--but no. It’s the black-haired girl, the one who defended her at the funeral and followed her in the hall. _Worthless little Muku-chan,_ Peko hears, a distant and thoroughly unpleasant echo. Peko pulls into a stance immediately, whether the girl is armed or not, and sure enough her shinai is frayed, the outer sticks of bamboo tattered through the middle and the central ones cracked and bent. 

“Even without her weapon, she could have faced me, Ikusaba,” Oogami says. Enough blood has gathered on her chin to drip off, and it splatters on her breast. “Forgive us for the state of the dojo.”

“It’s fine,” Ikusaba says. “I came because of the commotion, not to train.”

Oogami accepts that, and nods; Peko glances down at her broken shinai, and can’t. “No, Oogami-kun. She’s right. If I hadn’t traded out my sword for this in the first place, you’d never have broken it. The mistake is mine, and the match is yours.”

“No. The fight continued even after you misdrew,” Oogami says, crossing her arms.

Ikusaba comes out of the doorway, but stays by the lockers, idly trails her fingers at the level of the locks. “You lost when you let go of your sword in the first place, Pekoyama-senpai. You failed to assess Oogami-san correctly.”

Neither of these freshman girls has actually asked if there’s something wrong, but Peko hears that all the same. And yes, there is.

“I did,” Peko says, and bows, “and I concede defeat.”

“I contest it,” Oogami says, bowing as well, and the blood in her hair streaks across the remains of the floor. “I look forward to a rematch.”

Ikusaba snaps open one of the lockers and produces a first-aid kit.

***

“Here.” Ikusaba snaps the instant-cold pack to activate it, then presses it to Peko’s shoulder. It’s like ice through her sweater, but the cure tends to be worse than the sickness with a contusion like this. Ikusaba’s fingers smell faintly of blood under all the antiseptic: Oogami, once her head was bandaged, thanked her and left, but Peko can’t quite shake the specter of her presence.

Or maybe that’s just Ikusaba. She’d probably understand.

“Thank you,” Peko says, leaning a little forward to accommodate the ice pack.

“It’s fine.”

“I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”

“Ikusaba Mukuro. But I know who you are.”

Peko nods. There isn’t as much strain in her neck as there was a moment ago. The bruise must have slowed its spread. “What are you to Enoshima-kun?”

Apparently the chill of the ice pack has passed to Ikusaba as well. If Peko had hackles, they’d raise, and not only from the goosebumps prickling across her entire back. But she doesn’t sense _fear_ , not even nervousness; it’s honestly more like confusion, a kind of placid absence of direction.

“Something like what you are to Kuzuryuu-senpai,” she says. “Whatever she needs me to be.”

“And why her?”

“Why does it matter? It’s her. Has anyone ever asked you, why him?”

For their first six months at Hope’s Peak, they tried to pretend. They made a show of introducing themselves for the first time in front of their class, scrupulously avoided each other in the halls, never talked unless school called for it. The teachers and researchers all knew, of course, and smirked or scribbled on their tablets whenever it came up. And Peko was as discreet as she could be about watching him, guarding him, bringing him the information he wanted on the other students, carrying out his will, but gossip followed her no matter what she did.

Then, in September, halfway through freshman year, Saito Shinatsu, that Super High School Level Shinobi Peko admired so much, broke into the Young Master’s room and made an attempt on his life. If Peko hadn’t heard the shuriken flying--if the Young Master hadn’t been able to hold his own until she got there--if Peko had been one second too late--

It doesn’t matter. Saito met his end that night, and the Young Master didn’t.

It was the messiest killing Peko ever performed, aside from her first. Saito’s blood still soaks the floorboards, even if Hope’s Peak had the carpet replaced. And she found one of his teeth in the Young Master’s bookshelf three months later.

That night, she refused to leave his side. That morning, after the police were through with them, they walked into class together, made sure the desk behind him was vacated, and let the rumor mill churn. No one at school has dared to cross him since.

But plenty of people have asked, _why him?_ ; the police, the researchers, the former upperclassmen who missed their friend. And now, Ikusaba.

All Peko tells her is “Yes. They have.”

Ikusaba presses the ice pack instead of the issue.

“What does Enoshima-kun want with the Young Master?”

“I can’t disclose that,” Ikusaba says. “You’ll keep opposing her?”

“If she tries to hurt him, she’ll pay. It’s that simple.”

Ikusaba nods. Her hair tickles the condensation on the back of Peko’s neck. “And if she doesn’t?”

Peko shuts her eyes and tries to say _It doesn’t matter._

The words don’t come.

****


	3. Chapter 3

The pain in her shoulder spreads into her dreams, and everything is hot and sore and swollen. She knows she must be dreaming because as there aren’t any waterfalls at Hope’s Peak, at least not that she’s ever seen. A brilliant Hokusai print unfolds in stamps and whorls before and around her, pure whites and rich blues and the papery gold of the Young Master’s eyes. Water drums in her ears, shapes her body like the rocks.

The Young Master stands and watches.

She’s not sure whether he’s on a rock or just on the water, but it doesn’t matter: the edges of her vision fog with steam and mist no matter where she looks. The waterfall pounds her back, but she won’t let it cow her, not if the Young Master wants her to look him in the eyes, and he does, she knows it: everything that isn’t pain is want, that want.

He reaches into the water drilling down on her, covers her collarbone with his palm, pushes her shoulder into place. His hand is warm and slick and hard, and that part of her is perfect now, smoothed and forged and everything that isn’t what he wants is seared and weathered away. Peko’s skin molds to his touch, and he smiles, color rising as red as the sun in his cheeks. There’s more, she tells him, _there’s more,_ and he can make her into anything, fit himself to her and wield her and _hold her, touch her, have her and be happy--_

_\--he molds her mouth into words he wants to hear, and they’re the same words she already wants so much to say--_

“Hey, no fair,” Enoshima laughs, “Muku-chan did way too good a job. She never puts me back together. ‘Course, if this super-luscious body of mine gets hurt, socialized medicine pays for everything.”

Peko grabs for the sword that should be within reach at the futon’s edge and _throws Enoshima off_. The sword isn’t there, why isn’t it there--

“Forgive my impertinence. Were you wanting this?” Without her glasses, Peko can’t see Enoshima as anything but a beige, black, and blond blur, but the sound and flutter of Enoshima tapping Peko’s sword against her palm is far too clear. “Such measures are both unnecessary and in violation of the dorm rules. What if you were to roll over and--”

Good thing Peko has a tanto under her pillow. She goes for that instead, and lunges for Enoshima’s throat with both hands, armed and otherwise. It’s no contest, and she slams Enoshima into the carpet, knife at her jugular.

“Nice thong,” Enoshima whistles, remarkably happy for someone with a choice between getting her hair torn out or her throat slit. “Last year’s Ravijour, huh. Thrifty but sexy, just right for the kendoka on the go.”

“Give me one good reason not to kill you.”

“Mm. How about, Fuyuhiko-senpai never told you to? You only kill for him, right? Isn’t that the catchphrase?”

“If you’ve done anything to him--”

“Boring! Senpai senpai senpai, Young Master Young Master Young Master, _him him him_. Feh! Can’t we just have one conversation between girls? Just Junko and Peko, being two fabulous ladies in a story about us, is that too fucking much to ask?”

Peko touches the tip of the blade to Enoshima’s skin. The artery might slice itself open if her heart beats any faster. “Fine. Start by telling me what you’re doing in my room.”

“Right now, lying under you in some negligee. Mine’s couture though. And it totally clashes with your hair, so if you buy it, buy it in wine red instead of ecru. Next question!”

“Why did you come in here in the first place?”

“It’s hell getting you alone, Peko-senpai, you know that? Hell. Pure fucking inferno, brimstone and circles and Beatrice and everything.” If Peko didn’t know better, she’d think Enoshima just _squirmed_. It might just be her lack of glasses. “Had to go to straight into the dragon’s lair, you see? Because, oh my dear Peko-senpai, despite my knowing virtually nothing of lilies, I find myself drawn to you. I yearn to reach inside you and discern just what drives your magnificent heart.”

Whatever else she dreamed, there was a waterfall, and hands, and Peko remembers it all in a wash of heat. Her grip on the knife tightens. So do her legs, on Enoshima’s thigh, though that’s only reflexive, it has to be. “I thought you said you understood me.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t want to take you apart,” Enoshima trills. Her fingernail is sharp, nearly as sharp as the knife, tracing down Peko’s chest. “I want to know what makes you tick. What makes you happy, what makes you despair, what ticks you off, what turns you on. I said a lot before and I can’t say I was wrong,” she hooks her finger into the waistband of Peko’s thong, “but I want to know just how right I am about you.”

Peko is not sure if it’s instinct, prudence, or luck (and if it’s luck, whose luck?) that makes the knife flinch _away_ from Enoshima’s neck. She doesn’t drop it, but it’s a near thing, and she yanks tighter on Enoshima’s hair to compensate. “I thought you were after the Young Master.”

Peko’s underwear snaps hard against her hips when Enoshima lets go. “Him again! That’s the trouble with you, it always comes back to him! Can’t a girl sexually experiment in peace? I bet even if I did get into your pants you’d spend the whole time thinking about him. Fuck, you’d probably want him to watch, you dirty girl. Or ask his permission. That’s it, isn’t it, you just want to make sure he gets the good parts of everything you do, and that includes me.”

“It does _not_ include you.”

“Right, right, you’re not the one that does the doing. Or you are, but you don’t want to be. It would be so easy to be Pekoyama Peko if someone else was being her for you. Doesn’t that sound nice? Fun? _Easy?_ Someone else gets to turn the gears and pull the strings and make all the hard decisions and make it like you never did any of the horrible things you do because it wasn’t you after all. Oh, officer! you can’t arrest the car for speeding or the knife for cutting or the crushed velvet giraffe-print bustier for being worn. Just the person. But you don’t want to be a person, do you, Peko-senpai? Because tools don’t kill people.”

Peko drops the knife. It skitters on the carpet, leaves a dent but not a scratch.

“So I guess you’re right!” One of the straps of Enoshima’s negligee slips off her shoulder as she wriggles lower, all girlish glee. “You won’t do me. You’ll just lie here like tuna, ooh, it’ll be so exciting! Here, I’ll be the nerd, you be the dutiful body pillow, we’ll have an authentic teenage sexual experience!”

“Get out.”

“Oh, you _do_ have a will of your own. Drat. Now that you’ve said no, I can’t do anything without being the bad guy.” With a disappointed snap of her fingers, she rolls out from under Peko with far more grace than she deserves, and heads for the door with a skip in her step. With the lights out, and Peko’s vision uncorrected, Enoshima fades into the dark like a dream, until she opens the door, standing in silhouette. “But it would have been nice if you’d just said nothing. Then you could have been useful. And that’s all you want--”

The door shuts behind her.

“--isn’t it?”

It takes a long moment for Peko to even her breathing and gather the threads of her composure. When she finds her glasses--and her sword--and her phone, the clock reads 3:12 AM, and it would be pointless to go back to sleep even if she could.

Her shinai needs to be replaced, so she does her five hundred morning cuts with the sword instead, unsheathed, thrilling the air, until she can’t think, only count.

***

“Just come in, Peko,” he says when she knocks, so she does.

The Young Master’s tie is giving him trouble. He’s glowering at his reflection like he would wring its neck if it wouldn’t reach out of the mirror and do the same to his. Peko knows better than to help, and hangs back by the door. “Good morning, Young Master.”

“Don’t call me that, all right? Just don’t.” He jerks his tie undone again, adjusts the tails. Color flares in his cheeks, around the sharp creases in his forehead and nose. “Cheap piece of shit--I mean. It, not you. The tie.”

“I know,” she says. And she does, even if she feels wretched and sore right now.

He tries to tie the tie again, and fails, leaving dark thumbprints on the silk. It could be water from his hair, or gel, or sweat, and Peko doesn’t mean to stare but--his _hands_.

This is inappropriate. Maybe Peko shouldn’t have worn herself out with five hundred cuts on no night’s sleep.

He yanks the tie through his collar and throws it onto his dresser. “Forget it. Let’s just go.”

“But Y--” He said not to call him that. She’s not doing this right. She’s not doing anything right. “Of course. Let’s go.”

He didn’t sleep well either, that’s as plain as day. Circles as pronounced as his freckles frame his eyes, and his jaw is twitching, and when a cafeteria worker apologizes profusely on behalf of the broken miso pulverizer _but we do have a few Instant Soup packets in the Reserve Department cafeteria if you don’t mind waiting and I promise you our Western-style breakfasts are very good, just give them a try this once_ , he doesn’t lash out, just sneers and grabs a salt-encrusted bagel instead. And then he forgets to slice it in the guillotine at the bagel station, and tries to do it on his own with a butterknife.

Peko reaches over to help him. It’s the kind of mistake she wouldn’t make if she’d had a proper night’s sleep, but she makes it all the same, and it’s too late.

He swats her hand. It doesn’t hurt, just a sting and a shock, and if it weren’t on her injured side it wouldn’t register at all. But she freezes, and stares at her hand, at the grains of salt and the faint red tinge and the blue flare of her veins underneath.

“Shit,” he says, red in the face, “shit, Peko, I’m sorry--”

“It’s fine.” That’s true. It’s nothing. It’s her fault anyway, and she says that too, “Forgive me. I’ll go get a sharper knife.”

“No, don’t, just--I’m sorry, okay? That doesn’t mean you have to do anything. So don’t. Don’t...” People are starting to stare, and his shoulders tense, just like hers--and he notices. “Peko, what’s wrong with your arm?”

Oh. She hadn’t noticed how much she was favoring it. “I dueled with the Ogre yesterday.”

“What? For the researchers? You never told me they had a study going on.”

“It wasn’t for a study. We just...chose to duel.”

“And you let her hurt you?”

“She’s a formidable opponent. And she insisted on giving it our all.”

His jaw drops. “You dueled the Ogre with live steel?”

“I would have, but she broke my shinai before I could change it out. I still managed to injure her as well, I assure you--”

“Damn it, Peko, you shouldn’t do that without the researchers! What if you really got hurt? Who took care of you afterward?”

“A freshman named Ikusaba.” And once she brings up Ikusaba, Enoshima’s face flashes behind her eyes, as blurry as it was a few hours ago, and heat rises in Peko’s cheeks.

“What the hell kind of name for a doctor is that?”

“I don’t know if she’s a doctor.” _Bodyguard, more likely,_ she thinks, _but they wouldn’t accept another Super High School Level Bodyguard when there are already eight in the 77th class._ She’ll look it up later. “But there’s no need to be concerned for me,” she says, quickly, to drive everything else away. “I have not disgraced myself, or the Kuzuryuu family.”

“That’s not what this is about! The Ogre could have--” He cuts himself off before he gets to the verb, and shoves his tray away.

But they both know what he would have said.

“That’s fine,” Peko says, and the heat in her cheeks dissipates as the corners of her mouth curl. “If she had, she would have done the honorable thing. And I can be replaced.”

All of the color drains from his face, and his hand drops to the table, rattles the tray. “Peko.”

“It’s true. There will always be someone here to protect you--”

“Peko, stop it! Shut up! It’s _not_ true!”

“But Youn--but even if I weren’t here, you would still have--”

“You don’t get it! How the fuck don’t you get it?” He shoves back his chair, slams his hands on the table, shouts down into her face. “Once you’re dead, you’re dead! You _don’t_ come back, you _can’t_ be replaced! Once someone’s gone--”

“I’m not _someone_ ,” she says. “It’s different.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No. Forgive me, but maybe this time, you’re the one who doesn’t understand.”

He chokes on whatever he was about to say, and she feels that too, the same thickness in her throat. Her pulse races and the bruise in her shoulder throbs like a second heart, and she looks the Young Master in the eyes much more clearly than last night, in her dreams.

“I was given to you to be your tool,” she says. “That’s all I am. I’m not like Nabiki-sama, or your family, or even like the people who will serve you someday. Someone else can do what I do for you. Someone else can be what I am to you.”

He’s not breathing. He reels back, and covers his mouth, and he’s not breathing, and even if everyone in the cafeteria is staring he’s only looking at her and that’s wrong.

He staggers back three steps, turns tail, and runs. The crowd at the door doesn’t have time to part for him, and someone’s tray goes flying.

No. No, it was only the truth, he should have stayed and listened--and Peko is about to charge after him when a hand with red pincer nails comes down on her wounded shoulder and spears right in.

“Whew,” Enoshima whistles through her teeth, “trouble in a gangster’s paradise!”

Peko can’t bring herself to tell Enoshima to go to hell. Her mouth opens, and nothing comes out.

Another hand settles on Peko’s forehead, musses her bangs. “Ooh, hot hot hot! Doctor, doctor! Emergency! Symptoms: fever, delusions, fatigue, public declarations of toolishness. Don’t know how to explain the lowered sex drive, but everything else is right on point. Call me a Web MD but this sounds like a case of a broken heart!”

“Just stop it,” Peko says. She doesn’t have the energy for anything else. “Stop it, Enoshima-kun.”

Ikusaba stands behind the Young Master’s vacated chair, looks over Peko’s shoulder, then into her eyes. “She’s right, though. If what I did yesterday isn’t enough, go to the school nurse.”

Almost as if it’s punctuation, Enoshima digs her nails in again.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, he’ll be fine on his own,” Enoshima says. “And even if he isn’t, what does it matter? You know what he wants from you.”

“Nothing,” Peko says.

“Pin-pon, that’s right! So let’s have a little girl-time, shall we? As long as he doesn’t want you, you might as well fix yourself up in case he changes his mind.”

It’s not Enoshima’s words that get Peko on her feet: it’s Ikusaba’s level, sensible look. After that, she doesn’t think twice.

She doesn’t think at all.

***

Well, “girl-time” doesn’t pan out: Peko finds herself sitting in the infirmary alone with Ikusaba, and there isn’t much to say. Enoshima gets bored of waiting rather quickly, and Peko is too passively thankful to stop her from leaving. But there is still a queue, and the clock is ticking, and Peko would be alone with her thoughts if she could bring herself to think them.

She observes, instead.

That junior girl, Tsumiki, is here assisting the nurses. It might be that they’re assisting her, what with how much she knows, but she seems much more together here than she does with her friends. Peko understands. Perhaps, if there’s a moment that Tsumiki doesn’t look busy, Peko will question her about Nabiki--

\--but this isn’t the time to think about that, and it might not even be her place.

There are three people ahead of Peko in line: a boy who looks like an elementary school student but seems distressingly concerned with looking up Tsumiki’s skirt, a researcher with an arrow sticking out of her thigh (she must have gotten caught in Oniniwa and Sawada’s crossfire, and it serves her right), and a lanky boy with hair nearly as pale as his skin, holding himself and waiting patiently. When he catches Peko looking, he smiles, bright-eyed and frankly a little manic, but the look he gives Ikusaba is entirely different; tighter, terser, but still smiling. Ikusaba doesn’t react to him at all, and the lanky boy rocks into the back of his chair, glances sidelong at the floor.

“You find friends in such strange places,” he says.

It does seem directed at Peko, so she says nothing: a nurse emerges from one of the patient rooms and waves the researcher over, and the researcher limps off, clutching the shaft of the arrow and wincing all the way.

“Just my luck,” the lanky boy says, still smiling. “But I understand that trash like me doesn’t take priority even if it filters to the top.”

“Trash?” Peko can’t help repeating. Self-effacement is one thing, but she’s never heard a Hope’s Peak student put himself down like that, even sarcastically. “But you’re here.”

He leans nearer to say “But my talent is worthless,” and a lock of his hair brushes against Peko’s cheek. It’s starchy but soft, so fine it shouldn’t be able to hold a curl, not like the Young Master’s or the other men at the compound who bleach it.

The Young Master. No. She can’t think about this, and she can’t fight it out. So she keeps the conversation going, because at least that’s distraction, at least that’s not her own uselessness. “It must be worth something if it brought you here.”

“Well, it’s luck.”

“So cherish what luck brought you. If it’s only luck, you haven’t lost anything when your luck runs out.”

“That’s brilliant! That’s almost like a koan! Just like a Super High School Level Kendoka to say, it cuts right to the heart in one stroke.” So he knows who she is. She isn’t surprised. “Well, now I know how my luck works in this waiting room. If the nurses hadn’t skipped over me, I’d never have gotten to talk to you.”

His optimism is a little...cockeyed, to say the least. But at least he seems to feel better, so Peko nods politely.

“But I guess it’s hard advice to turn on yourself, just like a sword. Well, that’s why they make shorter swords for if you need to commit hara-kiri.”

“Excuse me?”

“I didn’t mean to say you should! I guess I can’t even come up with good similes. That’s becoming of my mediocre intellect, though. I shouldn’t expect any better from myself. I meant to say that it’s a hard thing to believe, that if something you never really had gets taken away you haven’t lost anything.” He wraps his arms tighter around himself, looks away again, like he’s either aroused or ashamed. “The longer something is almost yours, the longer you cling to the hope that it _could_ be yours, that it _will_ be yours. Even if it’s just s light at the end of a tunnel, it’s still guiding you. And once it goes out, you’re lost in a darker dark.”

Beside Peko, Ikusaba’s hand tenses on the arm of her chair.

“But you don’t have to let go of that hope,” the boy goes on. “Which is what I think you were trying to say, but of course you said it better and more succinctly.”

Thinking about hope isn’t the same as thinking about the Young Master. And it’s hard not to think about hope, abstract and weird as that is, when there’s someone sitting next to you pontificating about it. Odious and strange as he is, the boy is right about one thing: that hope changes you, the more you rely on it to get by.

“So please,” he says, with a pointed flick of his eyebrow at Ikusaba, “Pekoyama-senpai, don’t give into despair! As long as that hope you possess is part of you, don’t let it go!”

“I thought we were talking about you,” Peko says.

“Oh. So we were. I guess I can’t even be expected to hold on to the threads of a conversation. Not even Hope’s Peak can teach a wretch like me social graces after all!”

“Komaeda-kun,” one of the nurses says, emerging from another room, “I’m afraid we have bad news. That cold medicine we initially prescribed shouldn’t be used in conjunction with your radiation treatment.”

The boy--Komaeda, it seems--grins at her and shrugs. “That’s all right. I guess I really am lucky that those Reserve Department students mugged me before I could take any! I should thank them later.”

...all right, then.

Just in time, Tsumiki comes out of a patient’s room and says, “Pekoyama-san? We’re ready for you.”

Speaking of luck, _this_ is luck. Peko nods and obeys, and Ikusaba follows her, probably to explain what she did for first aid in case she needs to. Once everyone is settled in the examination room, Peko takes off her shirt and lets Tsumiki get to work.

“All right,” Tsumiki says, and her bedside manner is much more congenial and stable than Peko expected, “what happened?”

“I crashed into the wall during a match,” Peko says, because it isn’t necessary to get Oogami involved. “Ikusaba-kun gave me first aid yesterday, but it may be worse than a bruise.”

Tsumiki’s lip curls in sympathy. “That’s awful! It might be--here, just let me--” She presses her fingers to the bruise, and Peko can’t hold back a gasp as everything in her back buckles at once.

“Oh! Well, if it’s still this tender, we might have a fracture on our hands!” She immediately grabs Peko’s arm and tests the rotation, which hurts, but “Nothing’s dislocated, but I think I should send you to the labs for an x-ray before we do anything else. Let me just--” she jabs her fingers in again, and Peko wishes she could say she holds up under pressure but this is clearly _too much pressure_ , “--there. Oh, this really is awful. But I’m afraid I’m not licensed to perform surgery. Let me just write you a note to excuse you from class and I’ll send you to the labs right away!”

It’s perfectly acceptable, and Peko wasn’t particularly looking forward to spending time in class today. But someone’s got to look after the Young Master, and--no. No, no one does. It’s not that he doesn’t want her, it’s that he doesn’t want anyone.

Even so, there’s an opportunity right in front of Peko to help him, and even if she can’t be there, she’ll take it.

“Tsumiki-kun,” Peko says, very carefully--

“What? Did I do something wrong?” Well, there goes Tsumiki’s professional manner. “Oh gosh, have I aggravated the injury? I’ll--I’ll apologize formally in front of the whole school if you need me to! I’ll even hurt myself so that you and Kuzuryuu-senpai don’t have to take the blame for it! I deserve it, I promise!”

“Never mind,” Peko says, “it’s nothing. Just write the note. I’ll go get x-rayed.”

***

Well, now the researchers know about her injury, and they’re making as big a deal of it as ever. Once the x-ray concludes that it is, in fact, a hairline fracture on her scapula, which is impossible to set, she signs about fifteen consent forms and has them scanned and sent to the Kuzuryuu compound, and her classmate the Super High School Level Orthopedist gives her an injection. He says that if the serum doesn’t work by tomorrow, he’ll come up with something else or operate, so frankly it had better work. Then there are the tests, which go on for about four hours and take care of another two hundred and fifty cuts, and Peko is as thankful as they are that her rotation isn’t damaged, just one stationary bone, but it doesn’t make her any less tired.

When they break for lunch, she considers texting the Young Master to at least apologize and tell him what’s going on. She considers for so long that she ends up not doing it at all.

By the time they let her out, it’s past dinnertime, heading into sunset, and Peko is too wrung out to eat so she just heads to the dorms. At the corner at which she has to decide whether to go to his room or hers, someone else chooses for her.

“Kirigiri-kun,” she says, and doesn’t mean to balk.

Kirigiri nods. “Pekoyama-senpai,” she says, coming away from Peko’s door. “Unfortunately, I have to make good on your request for help.”

Peko freezes.

“There were photographs taken,” Kirigiri says, level but quick, “and they were developed. Once I found out what kind of camera Koizumi-senpai uses, I had my classmate, a programmer, perform a network-wide scan for its code. Of the photos Koizumi took on the day of the murder, seventeen were taken between the time of the victim’s death and the time of the janitor’s report, and five were developed in the visual arts lab, which only Koizumi-senpai and three other students in the school would have access to after school hours. All the files have been deleted from the mainframe but because she used a digital camera the filenames and the time of printing are logged in the system. It’s also clear that they weren’t edited and went through no post-processing before they were printed since the filenames don’t turn up in any other programs. I can only conclude that Koizumi-senpai, or someone else using her camera, took and developed the photos, but hasn’t given them to the police.”

Peko’s hand immediately goes to the drawstring of her fukuro. “So there are physical copies.”

“Yes,” Kirigiri says, “and someone might--”

“I know,” Peko say, already on her way to the Young Master’s room instead. “Believe me, I know what someone would use those for. You detain as many of those girls as you can find, it doesn’t matter how. I’ll find--”

The Young Master’s door is already open.

So is his window that faces the courtyard.

And the Young Master is outside, holding a bundle of glossy paper in his shaking fists.

****


	4. Chapter 4

There is everything to say, but Peko says nothing. The Young Master doesn’t say anything either, and hasn’t for almost an hour: he fidgets in his desk chair, taps his fingers on the arms and shifts from side to side, taps things into his phone and doesn’t read them aloud. Peko stands in the corner. There’s not much else to do, but being here is enough.

Isn’t it?

The stack of photographs is scattered on the desk. Peko’s close enough to see the ones at the top, with edges cracked like windows before they shatter and blurry streaks of thumbprints and condensation. That’s what Nabiki looked like when she died, battered all through her skull and face, her head lolling dangerously forward, blood from the struggle on her hands and her thighs. There’s the broken glass and the blood clinging to the shards, and a vase, shattered in the chaos, or maybe after. There are the junior girls, gossiping outside the music room before the murder without a hint of apprehension or premeditation: Saionji, Tsumiki, and Mioda, which means either Koizumi or Satou had the camera.

Which means either Satou is responsible, or Koizumi is responsible _and_ perverse. And the Young Master must be thinking the same thing, because if he wasn’t, he would have given Peko her orders by now.

His phone buzzes, and he receives the text, jabs at the screen with his thumbs. His hands haven’t stopped shaking. Peko would hold them if he let her, would take all that uncertainty and rage into herself and let him think, plan, clear his head so he can spur her to action. But he doesn’t let her, doesn’t let her do anything, and he curses at his phone as he corrects the text, twice, pounding the same section over and over.

On any other day, Peko could bear the silence. Today is not any other day. “Are you texting home?”

His head snaps up, too startled to glare. “What? --yeah,” he says, once he knows what she’s asking. “Just telling them I’ve got this.”

Peko nods. “Do you have a plan?”

“Of course I have a plan. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“No!” Peko blinks. “Not at all. But it would be best if I could prepare as soon as possible.”

“So I can’t do it myself?” He tosses his phone onto the desk. “Is that it?”

“No, I only meant that--”

“She fought back! This wasn’t a cold hit. This wasn’t a--it wasn’t some pervert who beat her up and--” He winces, contorts his face like he swallowed something sour. “Someone planned this. Someone did this, and planned this, and that someone’s going to get what’s coming to her. She’s going to feel just what Nabiki had to feel.”

“I understand,” Peko says, and can’t look at him, or the photos, or even her hands instead of his. “I’ll let you plan it. I’ll come back in the morning to accept my orders.”

“I said I’d do it myself!” The desk chair swivels hard into the desk, and he cracks his elbow on it, doubles over with a cry that’s almost like a bark or a laugh, and she reaches for him-- “No! Shit. No. You keep saying ‘I understand, I understand’, and then you don’t, Peko! You don’t get it! You don’t have to do this! I don’t want you to do this! And if I don’t do it myself, it’s like I didn’t do it at all.”

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t send me to--”

“You don’t think I can do it! That’s what you’re trying to say, huh? You think I’m weak!”

“I would never!”

“But that’s what you’re saying! That’s what you say every time you think you have to cover for me! You’re calling me weak just like her!”

Cold spears down Peko’s spine. “Like Enoshima-kun?”

“Like _Nabiki._ What does Enoshima have to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” Peko says, steps back, doesn’t quite reach the wall, “I thought--“

“Is that what you’ve been doing this whole time? Do you know more about this than I do, is that it?”

Peko could lie. 

Just thinking that she could lie means it’s true. And it only takes him one blink to see that.

Even if he’s staring at her like that, she still has time to pick her words from all the true ones. “I told the Super High School Level Detective that we wouldn’t be interfering with her investigation. I also told her we expected her cooperation if she found out that your life was being threatened as well--”

“Peko, what is the first fucking rule? We don’t need the cops! How long have you been doing this? How long have you been going behind my back?”

“I’ve never,” she starts to say, and only then remembers that’s exactly what she did. And that changes the way she says, “Forgive me.”

“You have. Fuck, you really think I’m pathetic, don’t you?”

“No, not at all,” she says. But her voice is getting smaller and smaller, and it’s no wonder he interrupts her so often, so easily.

“Don’t lie to me!”

“I’m not.”

“But you did! You just did! How can I trust you now?”

“Young Master, I swear--”

“ _Stop calling me that!_ ”

He’s shouted at her before, but not like this. This echoes off the walls, the laptop screen, the window, her glasses, and makes everything shake. Her sword thrills with the sound, like after a strike, even if it’s motionless over her shoulder. She turns away, as if she could stare down the pain.

“Just get out,” he snarls, slicing his hand down toward the desk, the photos, the glossy blood, “get out, _now_ , and don’t come back in the morning.”

Only years of clearing her mind and hiding her feelings keep the tears from falling. They well up behind her eyes like traffic with nowhere to go, but she won’t burden him with those, not after everything else. She makes it to the door, still steady, still together, and keys it open--

“Fuyuhiko-senpai!” Enoshima trills, carrying a croquet mallet over one shoulder, “other girls bring chocolates and love notes but I’ve got something even--”

Peko socks Enoshima right between the eyes before she can see her cry.

And then she takes off down the hall so she doesn’t have to deal with whatever comes next.

***

It has been a long time since murder last kept Peko awake.

That’s not to say it’s been a long time since she took out any hits. She received her last orders from the compound eight months ago, and four months before that, and after those, she came back to the dorms and slept. Slit throats and the stench of sweat and copper haunted her dreams, and she couldn’t keep much food down the next morning, but she slept.

But this is like after Saito, except that she isn’t by the Young Master’s side.

She blinks through the crust and salt around her eyes and stares through the dark at the ceiling. It’s no clearer whether she has her glasses on or off, so she keeps them off, just in case her mind gives in and lets her body finally rest. Her phone glows beside the futon, too far away to see the time. Her sword lays unsheathed beside it and the blade shines faintly, the hamon waves at the edge of the blade jagged and white until they, too, disappear in the dark.

She reaches over, takes hold of the hilt, brings it close enough to see.

There is nothing inscribed on the blade except the maker’s name, in kanji so brusque that they’re nearly illegible. The fractures on the sheath aren’t echoed in the steel. It is plain, streamlined and clean and nothing but its function, which is to kill. It responds to flesh only with the strength applied to it. Its simplicity is even more beautiful than its workmanship. It does not think, and it does not feel, and it does not do anything but what its wielder tells it to.

Peko knows every story ever told of swords that thirst or crave or act without their master’s will. They’re stories of horror and blood sacrifice and madness and pain. A sword should be silent, obedient. If it isn’t, it will hurt its master. It’s that simple.

But no one ever asks the sword why it was not drawn in time. And no one ever asks the sword why its master is fallen, or whether it will be content to sit in its sheath and wait for another, another person to let it be what it is.

A sword should feel no contentment. A sword should feel nothing at all.

But Peko is imperfect. It’s that simple. She must be one of those cursed blades, like a Muramasa, discontent and hateful and wrong for all its masterwork. No wonder he doesn’t want to use her. No wonder he can’t trust her.

No wonder he hates her.

That shouldn’t matter. How he feels for her _should not matter,_ because she should have no feelings at all. A sword doesn’t care for approval or endorsement or even its master’s safety. No tool does, and no tool should, and Peko is a tool, no more and no less. Or, well, she should be. And that she should be makes it clear that she isn’t, just like knowing she could lie means her treason is true.

She could sheathe this sword, and do what he tells her to do. If she did, she wouldn’t be to blame for what happens to him. If he fails, or if he decides not to go through with his plan, or if he goes off the handle and--no. _No._

She sets the sword aside, still within reach.

People use tools to absolve themselves of the pain of killing. They need swords and shields to keep the blood off their hands and the pain out of their bones. _That_ is Peko’s function, and _that_ is what the Young Master needs, whether he orders her to do it or not. And he can hate her or curse her or cast her aside: that shouldn’t matter. She’ll be that cursed sword, as long as it means she cuts his enemies down, and not him.

This is probably too much to think about, so late at night, but even if she shouldn’t be thinking at all, she can’t stop. She has to figure out his plan, even if he won’t tell her, won’t trust her. But she knows his hits, and knows _him_ , and knows he’ll call Satou and Koizumi out, and whichever of them did it will pay.

The question is where, and which of them to follow.

***

They both show up at breakfast, and so does the Young Master. He eats alone. Peko sits with Oogami instead, though there isn’t much conversation to be had: it’s just like two years ago, and middle school, and pretending not to watch him, not to care.

The Young Master comes to class, and stays there through lunch. He doesn’t look Peko in the eyes, or Peko doesn’t look him in his, but the result is the same, and hurts either way.

He skips lunch, or takes it elsewhere: Satou and Koizumi are at the same table, with the same girls as ever, so he hasn’t called them yet. He will. He’ll get them after school. Wherever he is, he’s preparing the site for interrogation, and if these were her orders instead of his industry he’d have her stake out a place she knows one of the girls will cross, alone, unguarded, as similar to the music room where Nabiki was murdered as possible.

A little discreet research and a text from Kirigiri get her Satou and Koizumi’s after school routines. Satou’s taken up an extracurricular interest in archery (strange, for a confectioner, but then again, who is Peko to judge?), but Koizumi photographs alone or from a distance unless she has portrait appointments. Satou will be in densely populated areas of the school until at least 4:30, with plenty of deadly people to protect her, and Koizumi won’t.

The Young Master has taken this into account too. Peko’s certain of that.

So once class is out, Peko heads to the art room, and waits across the hall, just out of sight. Koizumi emerges from it, camera and tripod in tow, with a laugh and a wave at the researchers she’s leaving behind. Perfect. All Peko has to do is stay out of line of sight and off camera until they’re alone.

She trails Koizumi for almost an hour, from the school to the courtyard to the roof of the sports complex, and Koizumi never suspects, never looks back. Whatever she’s feeling right now, it’s not guilt: she’s so completely absorbed in snapping pictures of the Super High School Level Colorguard that either she’s dealt with her feelings on the matter of Nabiki or never felt them to begin with. She leans dangerously out over the rail, tilts the tripod and clutches her flash precariously, and her freckles darken in the sunset.

Peko draws her sword--her shoulder only hurts with an echo of yesterday--and blocks the exit from the roof. “Koizumi-kun.”

Koizumi drops the tripod, and the camera falls with it, plummets five stories to the sidewalk. The crash echoes up the walls, and a commotion will follow it, but for now Koizumi is under all the right kinds of pressure. She spins half around and grips the rail for dear life, shrinking as Peko comes forward. “Pekoyama-senpai. What are you--why are you--”

“You know,” Peko says, and flourishes her sword to one side, lets the point nearly scrape the concrete. “So don’t ask.”

“But--but I didn’t--”

“What didn’t you do, Koizumi-kun?” Three meters to close, and down at ground level people are starting to whisper and wonder and pick up the pieces, and Koizumi glances over her shoulder but can’t turn her body from Peko even if nothing can protect her. “Tell me what you didn’t do.”

“I didn’t kill Nabiki-chan. I--if I had, I’d never have--”

“Never have taken the photographs?” Peko twists the sword, lets her know the edge is coming for her if she invites it.

“You can’t fault me for taking photos of a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Koizumi says, and her bravery is commendable even if her arms are still so tense a gust of wind could snap them. “It happened, and I documented it. That’s all. That’s the truth.”

“But you never shared it. You were in there before anyone reported her death. You were in there, taking pictures, and you let her body lie there for hours while nobody else knew. Who does that, except a murderer? You didn’t act alone, that’s clear now. It’s much easier to keep a secret when someone is shaking you down, isn’t it? You and all of your friends are guilty, Koizumi-kun.” Peko closes the distance, settles the blade against Koizumi’s throat so she can feel how cold it is before the end. “The question is which of their beds your head will turn up in.”

It’s easier than Peko thought it would be, to be the interrogator, not just the headsman. If the Young Master were here, would he be impressed with her? Would he believe that she can be all he needs now? Would he trust her again?

It shouldn’t matter.

Koizumi’s lip trembles and her shoulders shake, and she glances over the edge of the rail again at her camera, shattered on the pavement. That drop is her only alternative, and she knows it, and Peko lets her look.

“I can believe you didn’t kill her if you tell me who did,” Peko says. “So tell me, while you can still talk.”

There’s a raised pink line where Koizumi’s throat has thickened against the blade. “She had it coming, all right? I didn’t think anyone would go this far but you can’t tell me Nabiki-chan didn’t deserve to die!”

“I don’t care.”

“Of course you don’t, you’re a bully just like her.”

“Nabiki-sama couldn’t be faulted for acting within her nature any more than you can.”

“Well she could reap what she sowed! And so will you if you do this. I didn’t kill her! I told you I wouldn’t have shot it like that if I did!”

“Who killed her, Koizumi-kun?”

“I won’t--”

“You will. _Who killed her? _”__

__“You can’t make me--”_ _

__Peko presses the blade in, slits a thin red mark, the way a surgeon would mark the trajectory of incision. “You’re right, I can’t make you talk. But I can make you stop.”_ _

__Brave or not, Koizumi gasps as blood trickles down through the sweat on her neck, stains her collar as red as her hair._ _

__Peko draws back the sword, nods Koizumi a silent goodbye. It will be a clean kill, and her head will fly off the roof and join her camera below, and Peko will track Satou down and ask her just the same so the Young Master doesn’t have to--_ _

__“--Kichiko! It was Kichi--Satou Kichiko killed her! That’s why I threw the photos out! I didn’t know, I was going to go to the police but Hiyoko-chan said we shouldn’t get involved and then I figured out it was Kichiko! The photos had proof, the vase she shattered instead of breaking the window so she could lock the door and team up with us and pretend she’d never been there. Please don’t kill me, Pekoyama-senpai, I didn’t do anything wrong!”_ _

__The sword is already withdrawn. It has served its purpose, so Peko wipes it clean and sheathes it._ _

__Koizumi sinks down against the guardrail, clutching her throat. Her eyes flare as wide as a fish’s and she stares at the blood on her fingertips while her breath comes back to her. For a few, it’s almost as steady as Peko’s, at almost the same time._ _

__Then she reaches into her handbag for her phone and holds it up to Peko, more menacing than someone in her position should be. It’s commendable. “If you lay a hand on her, everyone will know it was you.”_ _

__“Yes. I know.”_ _

__“And you’re still going to?”_ _

__Peko shuts her eyes. “That depends on what my master has done to her first.” She turns, leaves Koizumi where she is. “I wish it had been you.”_ _

__Koizumi sags against the guardrail. “So do I.”_ _

__***_ _

__Peko takes the stairs down by two. She may not be too late. The Young Master had to trail Satou at least as long as Peko trailed Koizumi and would have interrogated her first too if there was any uncertainty, so there’s still time. There has to be time. There should be time._ _

__But that it should be there means it isn’t._ _

__No. No, if she runs, she’ll find them, she’ll make it, she’ll be what she has to. She’ll keep this from him. She winds down the stairs, nearly flies when she grips the rail and spins around the corner, breaks for the door._ _

__Satou would have left the locker rooms by this same door, would have walked back toward the dorms on this path, would have missed the commotion around Koizumi’s shattered camera and headed straight out. Peko stops, and listens, and can’t hear anything but her heart and the wind until she stills herself completely._ _

__It has to be enough. She has to be enough._ _

___There._ There’s a stifled shout from inside the building, a few doors down. It’s the Young Master. She isn’t too late, not at all, she just has to find him, them, him and Satou--the closer she gets, the more she can hear Satou shouting back--she finds the door, wrenches it open, charges in--_ _

__The Young Master has a baseball bat, and Satou is cowed on the floor in a corner, wringing her hands, alive._ _

__A cold, unbidden wash of relief flows down Peko’s shoulders, and she loosens her grip on the hilt of her sword. It’s improper, it’s _wrong_ to feel anything at all, but even if the Young Master is turning his hatred on her and there’s froth on his teeth she _isn’t too late.__ _

__“Peko, what the hell are you doing here?”_ _

__“I--” The first answer comes to her once her breath stops searing her throat. “Confirming that she did it. I interrogated Koizumi.”_ _

__“You didn’t need to do that!” He thrusts the baseball bat down, nicks the floor. “I told you to stay out of this!”_ _

__“Nevertheless, Young Master, I only intended--“_ _

__“To what, to stop me? So you do think I’m weak.”_ _

__“No. But you can’t be in two places at once.”_ _

__“I don’t need to be in two places at once! I knew it was her!”_ _

__“But Young Master, if you had told me--”_ _

__“I did tell you! I told you to stay out of it! I didn’t need you! I don’t need you! And you were going to stop me!”_ _

__“I was not!”_ _

__“Shut up, Peko! I can tell when you’re lying! Stop lying to protect me! Stop protecting me!”_ _

__“Can I please go now?” Satou whimpers from the floor._ _

___”Shut up!”_ _ _

__He swings the bat down. Satou’s skull cracks, so sudden and so loud that even the wetness reverberates off the tile. Even after the echo dies down, the static hiss of her blood fills the silence, drowns out even the Young Master’s breath and Peko’s pounding heart._ _

__“Shut up,” he whispers, staggering back, “shut up...”_ _

__He makes it to the wall, drops this bat. It clatters to the tile, rolls into the vertex of the wall and floor and bounces, once, twice._ _

__He looks Peko in the eyes, and he’s lost behind his. “So this is what,” he gulps, “you...”_ _

___Feel_ , he doesn’t have to say. _This is what you feel, when you kill.__ _

__Peko’s not sure she would answer that, even if she could._ _

__But she knows the answer now: _Not anymore._ She won’t feel anything anymore. That bat didn’t feel anything. Look at it, there, still ringing from the blow, but all it’s doing is lying in the cement between the tiles on the floor. It hasn’t cleaned off its blood, or begged its master’s forgiveness, or cared whether it struck too late or soon. It hasn’t done anything. The Young Master held it in his hands, and made it kill, and it was perfect._ _

__It will be better, next time. She’ll do it instead, and he won’t feel anything either._ _

__He runs, toward her, and she doesn’t move, lets him come--but his hands slam onto the door instead, and he barrels into the hall, leaving only his bloody handprint and the corpse behind._ _

__Peko wipes his prints off everything and rearranges the crime scene. When Koizumi comes to photograph this later, she’ll get her wish._ _


	5. Chapter 5

The water in her shower went cold long ago. It’s an unwritten rule that Hope’s Peak showers are the best in the country, and yet this one has run first lukewarm, then cold, in the hour that Peko has been standing under the spray. The pressure may even give out soon, and then where will she be?

Probably still here. She has nowhere else to be. She has nothing else to be.

“Oh, senpai, you poor dear,” Enoshima says. She shouldn’t be here, she shouldn’t have been able to get past two locked doors and a sense of propriety, but that she shouldn’t have means she has. She steps under the spray, nestles against Peko’s back. Her clothes itch and starch on Peko’s skin, suck the moisture away. “You’re gonna pay me back for this outfit when I get it cleaned. But I totally forgive you for breaking my nose. My top brand says I need a new one anyway. Not that I’m anything less than perfection, but you know how that goes, don’t you, Peko-senpai? Of course you do! We’re a couple of D-cup peas in black lace pods.” Her nose glides along the back of Peko’s neck, bandaged and clinging.

When she wraps her arms around Peko and cradles her like a stuffed toy, Peko doesn’t resist.

Enoshima twists the dial, shuts the shower off. “Ta-da! Now maybe you can hear me.”

Peko says nothing. Enoshima drags her out of the stall, snatches a towel along the way and wraps Peko in it, still holding on. Peko automatically grabs the shinai-fukuro from its place by the shower door, but other than that, nothing, not even her glasses. She doesn’t need to see. She doesn’t need to do anything at all.

“You know,” Enoshima says, twirling a hairbrush in her fingers like a baton, “it’s a strange, sad world we live in. Kids live on the street, idiots catch colds, boy bands all look and sound the same...” She sighs, and it rustles the hair tucked behind Peko’s ear, heavy and wet. “And men are rats. Fleas on rats. Single-celled disease-carriers on fleas on rats--literally! if you think of life is a fatal disease. But we don’t have to talk about that, do we? You know it. You cure people of life all the time. You’re such a good samaritan.”

She sits Peko down on the edge of the futon, and bounces beside her, flourishing the brush. Peko holds tight to the strap of the fukuro but everything else is pliant and limp, and Enoshima brushes Peko’s hair. There are snarls, there are always snarls, but Peko feels nothing.

“We can talk about other things,” Enoshima goes on, stroking the strands with her fingers once they’re untangled, winding them up, tangling them again. “Or I can talk, and you can listen. You’re good at that, you know. Not quite Super High School Level but you’re definitely up there. The school hasn’t had a Super High School Level Listener since the seventies. I guess listening’s gone mainstream. You know you’re the second Kendoka? I bet you knew that already. The first was in the very first Hope’s Peak class. He was a hitman too, like you. Thousands of hits! I mean, he must have been an absolute knockout in the ring, but everyone who knows knows it was just a cover for his _government work_. He disappeared in 1944. I think Muku-chan found him when she was off doing whatever Muku-chan does when I’m not around, not that I’m jealous or anything. And you know what he said to her when she found him?”

Of course Peko doesn’t know.

“Nothing, ‘cause he didn’t have a tongue.” She tugs Peko’s head forward to get at the hair on the other side, still wet, still tangled. “Or teeth. Enemies catch up with you, you know. And you stop being strong, and you stop being perfect, and you stop being useful, and you wind up sitting around a market in a third-world country where it doesn’t even matter that you don’t speak the language because you couldn’t talk if you tried!” She nuzzles the nape of Peko’s neck, hums almost like a cat would purr. “Oh, and someone severed the tendons in his hands too. I wish I could have seen it. I never will, though, he’s dead. Muku-chan put him out of his misery. Idiot.”

The brush scrapes through Peko’s hair, lowers the towel every time it reaches the bottom. Enoshima’s hair is drier, softer. Peko’s stings.

“So since the old asshole’s dead, and I’m in the market for a couple more talented people to disappear, and Muku-chan’s worthless when it comes to complex shit like this and besides she’s got some long-form improvisational theater gig coming up, I thought you and I could make an arrangement.”

“I only kill for Kuzuryuu Fuyuhiko,” Peko says. It’s all she has to say.

“Oh, that’s fine!” Enoshima kisses Peko behind her ear. “He’ll order you to.”

***

She stands outside the Young Master’s door and waits, but doesn’t knock. He emerges from the room two minutes late, his tie crooked but done, and looks her in the eyes long enough to not say good morning.

The hallways are clear wherever they go.

***

The summons to Headmaster Kirigiri’s office comes right on schedule, just when the Young Master has finished breakfast and class is about to start. Even the researchers keep their distance on the way, flank them like jailers but clutch their tablets and styluses like murder is contagious. The Young Master scowls at all of them, stalks ahead of the pack like he isn’t afraid. He probably isn’t. Peko isn’t either. She’s not sure what she is, but she isn’t afraid.

Kirigiri--Kyouko, not the Headmaster--is waiting outside the door when they get there, arms crossed, photograph in hand. The Young Master falters, but Peko does not.

“Pekoyama-senpai.”

Peko nods.

“I just wanted you to know I know,” Kirigiri says, and shoulders through the crowd.

She pushes the photo into the Young Master’s hands, and he startles back to hold on to it, but by the time he turns around to yell at her she’s disappeared. The Headmaster comes out of the office, waves them in.

“I think you know why you’re here,” Headmaster Kirigiri says, once the door is shut behind them.

“Yeah.” The Young Master looks braver than he sounds, and sits. Peko takes her place behind him. “So why are _you_ here?”

Headmaster Kirigiri doesn’t smile, just sits in his desk chair, props his elbows on the mat and his forehead in his hands. “The rules of the Hope’s Peak state that no student can be penalized for acting within the parameters of his talent. I know your rules and so do you, Kuzuryuu-kun, and everyone who comes here while you’re here takes that into account. Satou-kun’s family can’t take you to court, and neither can her company, and the school isn’t liable either. And furthermore, what she did to your sister was out of line, _and_ beyond the scope of her talent. If we’d found her first, she would have been arrested. But that wouldn’t be enough for you, would it?”

“Stop asking questions you already know the answer to.”

Headmaster Kirigiri sighs, though it’s more like a scoff. “Fine. Are you done with your justice, Kuzuryuu-kun?”

His back straightens against the cushions of the chair, and Peko rests her hand on the back. “She can’t take anything else from me,” he says, quieter than before. “So yeah. I’m done.”

“Are you?” Headmaster Kirigiri looks up between his fingers, then lets his hands fall to the desk. “There will be other people who try to cross you. There will be people who want what you have, or think you shouldn’t have it, or people you just piss off. There will be people who you’ve angered with stunts like this, and their friends, and _their_ friends, a whole world that doesn’t want you in it. And if they can’t touch you, they’ll go for what they can touch, and you’ll fight back like you’ll always have, and nothing will change--except for the part where everyone around you is missing a few fingers and attending a few funerals. Is that it? Is that how easy it is for you?”

 _No,_ Peko thinks, _but it’s how easy I’ll make it._

“I told you,” the Young Master growls, gripping the arms of his chair, “to stop asking questions you already know the answers to.”

“Fine,” Headmaster Kirigiri says, “you’re both dismissed. Clear out, go to class. I’ll negotiate hush money with your father, and you’re both confined to the campus for a week and sitting an hour of additional research a day until the end of the term.”

“You just said we can’t be punished--”

“--for acting within the parameters of your talent. Giving me grey hairs isn’t a Super High School Level Yakuza’s talent. Or a kendoka’s, for that matter.”

“It is if I hack off your feet to fit you for cement shoes.”

“Violence against the Headmaster is one of the few things that’s prohibited in this school. I can’t protect you if you do that.”

“You couldn’t protect Nabiki, and she didn’t do anything to you. And you’re not protecting me now, I’m protecting myself!”

“You’re not protecting anything, Kuzuryuu-kun. You got your revenge, and now you’re done. I don’t care how much you shake me down or how much money you’re funneling into Hope’s Peak, and right now I don’t even care how talented you are--you’re still a student here, which means yes, I am protecting you, grey hairs and all. And I’m doing it because I have hope that, someday, you’ll use your talent to better our world.”

The Young Master pushes down on the arms of his chair and stands. It’s Peko’s cue to follow him, and she does, without a word.

But when he passes close to her she hears him mutter, “That makes one of us.”

In the hall, the researchers are waiting. They coordinate Peko and the Young Master’s extra hours for after class, and disperse, leaving them to start the day.

“Peko,” he says, once they’re alone.

“Young Master?”

“He didn’t have much to say to you.”

She glances at the door. “There’s nothing to be said. A tool cannot be faulted.”

His throat bobs, and he adjusts the lopsided knot of his tie. “Peko, you’re not a--”

His eyes are full, and hers are empty. She’d fix it if she could--no. She’d fix it if he wanted her to, and he doesn’t want her to. He’ll tell her what he wants.

“Come to my room later,” he says instead, grimaces toward the floor and wipes the tears away as if he’s shoving them back where they came from. “We’ve got shit to plan.”

“I will,” she says. It’s truer than _I understand._

*****

 

**epilogue - two years later**

Komaeda recovered the body. It was luck that he found it first, and he took Enoshima’s left hand before anyone else could get to it. Despite how many times she crossed the Young Master, it still had all its knuckles.

So the Young Master took her eye instead.

The blood from his socket is still crusted through his lashes and on his cheek, sealed with vitreous fluid. Peko doesn’t know why he chose the right and not the left to stab out. It took him three tries, and she stood by and watched.

He looks up at the red, smoldering sky, then down again, and only his eye can track the smoke. Enoshima’s is blue and shriveled and lifeless, rolling around in his socket like a stone in a river.

“I can’t see anything,” he says, to no one, least of all Peko. “Why can’t I see what she saw?”

It is not Peko’s place to say.

*******


End file.
